August 2016

Part of our mission at FAN/FIC Magazine is to highlight amazing fan creators and pull back the curtain on their creative processes. For our very first interview, I talked to one of my absolutely favourite Harry Potter fanfiction writers, firethesound, whose fic All Our Secrets Laid Bare is one of the must-reads in the Drarry fandom. In the following interview, we discussed Slytherin ambition, writing by the seat of your pants, and what’s so compelling about the Draco/Harry pairing. //

If you’ve ever participated in NaNoWriMo, the annual National Novel Writing Month, you’re no doubt familiar with the self-affixing badges you can award yourself depending on your preferred method of storytelling: Pantsing or Plotting. Pantsers are spontaneous beings who like to fly by the seat of their pants. They don’t waste precious writing time crafting a story structure. They just write. Pantsers like to get everything out on the page and figure out the story as they go. //

Every year, thousands of people sporting their favorite geeky apparel or dressed as their favorite character descend on hotels and convention centers in most major cities. Fan conventions are a time for fans to gather together and share their unbridled, unashamed enthusiasm for all things geeky. But if you’ve never attended a fan convention before, how do you know where to start? I have been attending and staffing fan conventions for over a decade. I’ve got it tuned to a fine art, //

Welcome to the 2016 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Flash Fic Festival! You’ve read the script-book. You’ve seen the play. You’ve debated with Internet friends about what’s canon. Now, it’s time for imagination. With all the different reactions to The Cursed Child, we at FAN/FIC Magazine want to create a community-based challenge to revisit, rewrite, or reclaim the eighth instalment. If you could add or change any scene in the play, what would it be? With the //

Back in 2014 I stumbled across some gifs on Tumblr that pictured a quirky, humorous cartoon. I had caught up on the shows I had been devoted to watching and my now-husband had about had it with me watching Futurama on repeat to fill the gaps. I shrugged and decided to check the show out, expecting it would at least be good background noise while I wrote or cleaned the house. Immediately, I was intrigued the show was a Disney Channel Original. The humor I’d seen captured in bursts of flashing //

Flamboyant But Forgotten will be a regular column by contributor Rachel Cohen. In this column, Rachel will highlight some of the lesser-known historical figures whose backstories, personalities, and occupations make great fodder for creative fanfiction writing. As a fic writer, you inhabit the world of the story you have set out to tell. But that novel is set in some world as well, is it not? Very, very little on this Earth comes fully formed and unique out of the heads of its creators. Even //

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. If you haven’t seen or read it yet, whip out your Time-Turner and spool backwards now. The time has come for yet another article reacting to the strange tale that is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I’ve been an avowed Potterhead ever since I received The Philosopher’s Stone as a gift for my thirteenth birthday. As such, I have been nervously anticipating the release of Jack Thorne’s The Cursed //

This article is based on a comment by Reddit-user phantomcat, who published a post in the /r/Writing subreddit describing what they’d learned after writing over 400,000 words. In response to a question, phantomcat outlined how writing fanfiction has benefited their original fiction writing. Here are the links to the original post and phantomcat’s fanfiction comment. We’ve heard the scoffs, seen the eyerolls, and felt the skepticism from friends and family. But we shrug it all off. Because //

Draco slipped his hand into his pocket and closed his fist around the bottle cap, running the pad of his thumb over the ridged edge. It was foolish and sentimental and utterly unlike him, but Draco thought that he’d keep it as a reminder of the night he decided he was serious about Harry Potter. It’s six years after the Battle of Hogwarts and Draco Malfoy is working as an Auror. But the stigma of his Dark Mark still lingers as he is only trusted with the most menial, low-level Magical Law //

If you think fanfiction started with Harry Potter and Twilight, think again. The first written fanfics were the Midrashim, ancient commentaries on the Hebrew scriptures, dating as far back as the 2nd century. These rabbinical texts were doing exactly what fanfiction does – interpreting stories, filling in the gaps, and sending off pre-existing characters on new adventures. Guess which story the Midrashim were fanficking? Why, the Bible, of course! Apparently, Jewish scholars //

About

FAN/FIC is an online magazine for fanfic readers and writers. We publish compelling articles and personal essays about fan culture, practical advice on how to improve your craft, and interviews with people in the community.